The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) currently has Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) initiatives underway to develop applications for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications for the purposes of improving vehicle safety. Two such applications, Curve Speed Warning (CSW) and Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance System for Violations (CICAS-V), utilize ITS road maps broadcasted, typically with limited range, from local road infrastructure to an onboard Vehicle Safety Warning System (VSWS) to provide the location and characteristics of local road features of safety concern. The VSWS utilizes the ITS road map information along with vehicle information, such as vehicle location and vehicle speed, to determine if a safety concern exists that warrants issuing a driver warning.
In order for the VSWS to determine if a safety concern exists, the VSWS must first determine if the vehicle is located on a road feature defined by the ITS road map. Known navigation system map matching methods used in many global positioning system (GPS) navigation systems continuously attempt to map match a vehicle location to a road network defined by a navigation system map. Since there may be many instances when the vehicle location cannot be successfully map matched to a road feature defined by the ITS road map, due to the sparse amount of road network defined by the ITS map (i.e. only road features of safety concern), utilization of known navigation system map matching methods that are configured to continuously map match to a road network will lead to inefficient usage of VSWS computational capacity.